Information Sources in Planning: Principles

            - Henri
Lefebvre, The Production of Space p. 44.

"In the
realm of headings that deal with people and cultures – in short humanity – the [Library
of Congress] list can only satisfy parochial, jingoistic Europeans and North
Americans heavily imbued with the transcendent, incomparable glory of Western
civilization."

            - Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies, p. 15

All planning is problematic; all proposed interventions
imply some normative stance on our socio-political arrangements. Any changes to
our housing, work environments or transportation networks affect our social
relations, and are dependent on a complex political economy of development processes
and practices deeply embedded in power relations. As Lefebvre famously argued,
all spaces are by their nature ideological; they are the manifestations of the
values, principles and ideals of those who created them.

This is just as true for information sources: Just as city
blocks may be set out in uniform grids and built upon according to prescribed classification
schemes, information too – be it in the form of books, journal articles or
websites – is indexed, formatted and classified by coordinates both conceptual
and spatial. Again, such schemes derive from a normative view of the world;
and, as Minnesota librarian Sanford Berman pointed out in his famous treatise Prejudices and Antipathies, classification
and cataloguing schemes are hardly neutral but can be profoundly biased and resistant
to alternative world views.    

As both a planner and a librarian, I use information
literacy principles in the courses I teach in order to stress the
intersections between the built and informational environments. I point out
that they are each equally designed and structured, comprising both physical
and conceptual elements; exhibit a tension between the formal and informal, the
top-down and the grassroots; and can be made – depending on the biases of their
creators – more or less accessible to different constituencies.

When engaging with our present vast information environment,
it is therefore essential to be able to identify bias, to distinguish between
valuable and less reliable information, and to be able to counter
misinformation. As I wrote in my previous entry (and to which Andrew Whittemore's
recent essay in Atlantic Cities about countering Tea Party antipathy towards
planning attests)
the increasingly controversial nature of planning makes this task imperative.

Yet our present information environment also makes this
extremely challenging. Between the Internet's tendency to facilitate self-insulating
ideological bubbles and a postmodern culture of epistemological relativism, the
ability of individuals, groups and entire political factions to select their
own array of convenient "facts" has exploded beyond reckoning. Just this week,
Garry Trudeau is using his Doonesbury strip to take aim at the pollution of
American public discourse with toxic propaganda: a phone operator at a company
called "myFacts" fields calls from customers seeking "facts" to support their
own pre-determined conclusions about such culture war controversies as climate change, creationism and President
Obama's birth certificate.

Discerning reliable information from its opposite is not as
easy as simply conflating the authoritative or official with accuracy, for
governments and institutions bring their own structural biases to data
collection and distribution that can distort and disguise important social and
economic realities. Here in Canada
– and in the face of howls of protest
– the Conservative Harper Government chose in 2010 to scrap the long-form
Census in favour of a shorter and voluntary one. Opponents fear that vulnerable
populations will be dramatically underrepresented, but it remains to be seen if
this will be borne out as the data is only now beginning to be released.
To cite another example, Marilyn Waring revealed in her book If Women Counted how mainstream economic
indicators woefully distort reality by omitting or discounting the economic contributions
of women in non-paid family, community and supportive roles.

It is of course also untenable to give equal weight to the
cacophony of voices in the Web, where anybody with a keyboard has the opportunity
to make their views known, where ideological partisans have been caught
re-writing inconvenient Wikipedia entries,
and where authoritative appearances can sometimes disguise outright falsehoods
(even humorously so). Even that linchpin of sound academic practice, the
peer-reviewed journal, is not immune to controversy and confusion, as the
recent scandal at the scientific journal Life over a
disputed published paper demonstrates.

All this is not to say that the task is hopeless; far from
it. The unprecedented richness of our information environment brings with it
tremendous opportunities to enhance existing knowledge and develop new forms of
knowledge, to inform policy debates, and give voice to constituencies whose
perspectives have, for too long, been silenced or disregarded.

Instead, the search for valid and reasonable information is
an ongoing and difficult process of negotiation and reflexivity, one in which
we must be able to both compare the claims made by data and their interpreters,
and to account for our own relationship to these claims. After all, inasumuch
as institutions and authors alike bring their own biases to bear on their
outputs, so too do we bring our own preconceptions – and indeed, entire
world-views – to our investigations, and these can give shape to our facts,
rather than visa-versa. We cannot eliminate these tendencies, only account for
them.

In my next post, I shall illustrate such practice by
comparing and contrasting two planning-related websites against evaluative
criteria.